INTRODUCTION By Christophe Deloire, Chair of the Forum on Information and Democracy THE FORUM ON INFORMATION AND DEMOCRACY AN INSTITUTION OF OUR TIME We feel the effects of climate change in our lives, even sometimes in our bodies. The consequences of the disruption of the Earth’s ecosystem impacts our economies and potentially in the near future will impact our political systems. In the same way, effects of the information chaos weighs on our lives as individuals, societies, democracies and on international relations. Technologies bring benefits, but they also put systems in tension, out of balance, on the verge of tipping. In both cases, it is up to us to prevent a catastrophe from occurring. Launched in 2018, the Initiative on Information and Democracy and its founding Commission has led the development of an international process to establish democratic guarantees in the global information and communication space. This process represents hope for the future of the digital ecosystem. Prior to the second Summit for Information and Democracy, which will be held in New York on the margins of the UN General Assembly in September 2022, the Partnership for Information and Democracy has assembled 45 States from all continents. The Summits are consolidating as key opportunities to coordinate the creation of a democratic information and communication space. This innovative experience of multilateralism of democracies, articulating the role of international organizations, States and Civil Society in an unprecedented scope, has led to the creation of an implementation entity, the Forum on Information and Democracy. Since its creation in Paris in 2019, it has launched working groups with international experts to stimulate the production of an appropriate regulatory framework. The working groups have been able to put forward hundreds of practical recommendations for regulation on How to end infodemics (2020) and in favor of A New Deal for journalism (2021). Two new volumes have been announced, a third report on Accountability regimes of social networks and their users and a fourth one on Pluralism in curation and indexation algorithms. A productive dialectic between international organizations, States, and civil society assumes that political leaders can anchor their decisions on shared findings, established on the keystone of a synthesis of academic research from all around the world. To finalize this international architecture, the Forum on Information and Democracy has decided to create, within its structure, the Observatory on Information and Democracy. With the mandate to assess the functioning of information and communication space, the Observatory will answer to the need of having a compass to guide evidence-based public action. This feasibility study designs its creation. To create an “IPCC of communication and information” assumes to count on convinced, visionary, and engaged people. On behalf of the Board of Directors of the Forum on Information and Democracy and its staff, I am grateful to the co-chairs of the prefiguration group, Angel Gurría, former Secretary General of the OECD and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, and Shoshana Zuboff, Author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Professor Emeritus, at Harvard University. Our appreciation goes to all the members of this working group, particularly to Maria Ressa, Journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate 2021, who has been one of the main actors of this initiative since day one. Assess, propose, gather. These three words define the three axes of our work. To move forward as fastly as necessary, we will need good will from all of those concerned.